Are Programmers Control Freaks?

Strange post: don’t read if you expect something coherent.

I like programming a lot. What bugs me most in programming is when I have to use very complex systems, that I can’t easily understand or change without investing a lot of time to understand it. This includes Maven, ServiceMix or the Windows API.

Control Yourself
I guess this is the same reason people still use text editors instead of full blown IDEs. They want to be able to understand and control what happens – which is nearly impossible if you’re using very complex systems for the first time – especially if Java people have created them.

This made me wonder if all programmers are control freaks.

In their jobs, they need to be extremely cautious, ever detail, every bit of information must be processed correctly for their programs to work. They plan their applications minutely, they use unit testing to be sure their functions work as expected, the make the program crash intentionally if something goes wrong just so that they realize as fast as possible when something goes wrong.

Answer: no, that’s just the job. Of course it can transfer to their offline life, which would be as bad as if some non-programmer alsways tries to control everything. And to make that point too: nobody can or should control everything in their life – if it’s not code.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Fortimbras

, Posted Monday, February 14th, 2011 under Shorts.

One comment so far

  1. cool bro.

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